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A search engine optimization specialist since 1997, Ross has provided SEO consultation and campaigns for companies from all parts of the world; from Victoria's own Prince of Whales Whale Watching to Time Inc. Interactive in New York City. Ross is also a long-time contributing writer for several industry-leading blogs and the co-host of the popular "SEO 101" radio show which airs weekly on WebmasterRadio.FM.
A long practicing SEO, Ross is a passionate speaker and website marketing consultant who loves to guide small and medium sized businesses to greater visibility and success online.

I loved this article, well done! I like it when my mind gets stretched a little :-)

I wanted to take a moment to address the canonical tag idea because I have some recent experience with the tag working.

1) I think it would be very hackish to keep the old CMS running just to use the canonical tag. You would have to keep it up indefinitely in order maintain any link juice pass-through which just seems crazy.

2) I have a client that is on the Yahoo Shopping platform which is allergic to 301 redirects... unbelievable I know - they don't allow them!! Anyway, he switched his URLs and essentially mirrored his content while using the canonical tag to get Google to register the new URL as the main one.

Well there was a lot of nerves around whether this would actually work because many of the older pages were top ranking, top delivering pages so he couldn't afford to have his pages lose traffic. When the Canonical tag was implemented there was a space of about a week, I believe, where rankings simply dissapeared... our stomachs were at our knees. Then just a week later the rankings had reappeared and they were all referencing the new URLs... in some very competitive terms. By all accounts the link juice WAS passed effectively. I honestly do not think they would have ranked as well if the juice had not been passed.

So, the canonical tag turned out to be the ultimate solution to Yahoo's lack of support for 301 redirects. Unfortunately the other system will have to remain online to keep the canonical tags in place and keep passing the juice but we are about to change that as well through a convoluted domain switch (sigh).